The AI Buildout's Human Cost: A Running Ledger of Reported Deaths and Severe Injuries at US Data-Center Construction Sites

The stakes are the scale. Stargate, the $500 billion OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank program announced in January 2025, has run about 8,000 workers through 20 million work hours at its first Abilene, Texas campus alone, according to Oracle 1. OpenAI finance chief Sarah Friar put the operating principle in one line: "No one in the history of man built data centers this fast" 1. Business Insider has tracked 1,416 data centers built or approved for construction across the US by the end of 2025 2. The human cost has surfaced one site at a time: TIME rebuilt Abilene's injury history from OSHA filings, two lawsuits, and 911 logs, and Business Insider is asking data-center construction workers to write in about the job 1 3. No outlet can lean on a national count, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics logged 1,032 construction and extraction worker deaths in 2024 and sorts none of them by project end use 4.

BLS's fatality census counts by industry and occupation, never by end use 4. So each death lands wherever local procedure drops it. The Ashburn, Virginia trench collapse went to the Virginia Occupational Safety and Health Program, a state-run plan, not a federal OSHA investigation 5. Maurice McGowan's death in Medina County, Texas went to the sheriff's office; when KSAT asked federal OSHA about its own probe, an auto-reply said its media liaisons were out of the office because of the federal government's shutdown 6. At Abilene, OSHA told TIME it was "not aware" of the one on-site death 1.

Our method is the one TIME used for Abilene, run across every site we could find: incident-by-incident verification against local reporting, state-plan and court records, and 911 documentation, cross-checked with BLS program data. Federal OSHA does require employers to report work-related fatalities, inpatient hospitalizations, amputations, and losses of an eye 7, but its public severe-injury dashboard refused our automated fetcher with a 403, a refusal we honored, so the dashboard stays on the to-verify list rather than in the sourcing below. WTHR, the anchor outlet for the Indiana death, refuses automated fetchers too; we honored that refusal and rest the row on its indexed reporting plus independent corroboration.

The ledger: what we could verify

Four confirmed deaths across four states in seventeen months, plus a fifth fatality whose autopsy was still pending as of May 2026:

• April 10, 2025, Ashburn, Virginia. A worker on HITT Contracting's site died in a trench collapse at Vantage Data Centers' seven-building campus; rescuers pulled him out about 47 minutes after the first call. 5 8
• June 28, 2025, Fayetteville, Georgia. Anthony H. Riera Azuaje, 25, an Andrew Electric employee, was electrocuted while building the QTS data-center campus; his family is suing Allison-Smith Company over the temporary-power installation. 9
• October 6, 2025, Medina County, Texas. Maurice McGowan, 28, was struck by an articulating truck at the "Cinco Project," the future home of Rowan Digital Infrastructure's superscale data center; Turner Construction, the company overseeing the project, suspended all work. 6
• Unclassified. October 1, 2025, Abilene, Texas. Andre Guthrie, 61, was found dead on Stargate's first campus; police suspected a medical event, the autopsy was still pending in May 2026, and OSHA said it was not aware of the fatality. 1
• September 14, 2026, Lebanon, Indiana. A construction worker from Oklahoma was struck and killed by a pickup truck at Meta's $10 billion data-center campus in the LEAP district. 10 11

The dated rows are a floor, not a ceiling. WorkersCompensation.com, relaying a Columbus Dispatch investigation, reports a worker crushed to death and another who fell to his death at two Amazon data centers under construction in Jerome Township, Ohio, sites that have made 84 calls to firefighters since 2021; the coverage dates neither death, so both stay outside the ledger until dated records surface. 9

Five documented severe injuries at Stargate Abilene

From the OSHA filings, lawsuits, and 911 records TIME reviewed 1:

• May 23, 2025: a worker guiding a mini excavator was pinned beneath its treads, fracturing both femurs, his pelvis, and an ankle. OSHA proposed a $5,674 penalty to DPR Construction, a lead contractor at the site, then withdrew it in a settlement.
• Later that May: 1,400 pounds of glass panels fell on a worker's leg, causing a femoral shaft fracture that required surgery. The subcontractor told OSHA its employees were "in a rush"; the probe closed with no penalty.
• July 28, 2025: a jack slipped while a worker insulated piping from a ladder, fracturing a tibia and fibula. OSHA fined Ruiz-Boyter Construction Supplies $21,000, later reduced to $13,000.
• October 7, 2025: delivery driver Angelica Hernandez says a cement chute struck her at the site; her negligence suit against DPR Construction seeks more than $250,000.
• March 14, 2026: truck driver Daniel Gonzalez, 49, says a thrown chain concussed him; he is suing Kiewit Corporation, whose subsidiary The Industrial Company is constructing the site, and MMR Group.
• Taylor County 911 logs record 14 calls from the first campus since December 2024, among them a foot run over by machinery, a neck injury from a fallen object, heat emergencies, and a mid-20s worker's apparent heart attack.

Thin penalties, thinner proof

OSHA's initial penalty for the excavator pinning, four fractures, was $5,674, and it was withdrawn. Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA adviser now a fellow at Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, called it "highly unusual for OSHA to vacate a citation" when the settlement confirmed a hazard 1. Oracle says the site's incident rate runs about 2.5 times below industry norms and declined to show the data; the norms are employer-reported 1 12, and a 2004 peer-reviewed study funded in part by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health estimated such logs miss 33 to 69 percent of cases 1. This record cannot settle whether data-center sites are more dangerous than other megaprojects; it can show that 1,032 of the 5,070 US workers who died on the job in 2024 were construction and extraction workers 4, that 12 workers died in trench collapses in the first eleven months of 2024 5, and that trenching is the hazard regulators had already escalated, with OSHA's 2022 trench-enforcement initiative planning more than 1,000 inspections 5.

The ledger now counts four confirmed deaths across four states in seventeen months, and five documented severe injuries at the flagship site. Andre Guthrie's death is the one the official record has never classified: his autopsy had produced no public finding as of May 2026. The AI buildout already has capex ledgers, water trackers, and emissions trackers, ours included; now it has a casualty ledger.